England's mysterious sunken roads

England's mysterious sunken roads James Osmond/Getty Images A new mapping project by Natural England will help unearth the deep history and mystery of this ancient network of subterranean tracks. I was standing in Shute's Lane, one of the most famous of the sunken paths known as "holloways" that riddle the southern English county of Dorset. It's a common enough word that most people have probably never stopped to think about what it means – quite simply, a "hollow way"; a path or lane hollowed out into the soft earth. "At the canopy level, you get nice native woodland," Jefferies said, motioning to the ash and beech trees that crowned the holloway's banks. "We want to use the mapping to create virtual reality experiences of the holloways, so it's about intellectual as well as physical access," Cummings said.